🦦#449: Quicker to BER, shootings, a small oil leak

BABY OTTERS!

Dec 12, 2025

Otter-Nachwuchs — The Tierpark welcomed four new Asian small-clawed otters in October. Photo: Tierpark Berlin

Hey 20 Percent!

Thanks to those that came out to the very loud 20% Berlin News Quiz at Electric Social this week. It’s Maurice’s event but I stopped by to check it out. It looked fun! We’re aiming to do more events next year — it’s always hard for my socially awkward self but it’s always nice to meet y’all.

More soon-ish!

Have a good, Glühweiny weekend!

Andrew

🎁 Thanks to today’s sponsors, underwear boutique Linierie and spirit shop Agavera!

Quicker to BER, 20 years later

Berliners (and tourists) can now speed between our city and our airport in just about 15 minutes thanks to the new Dresdner Bahn (Dresden Railway), according to Tagesspiegel. The Dresden Railway is actually just 16 kilometers of new tracks (one set in each direction) that cost €1.1 billion between Südkreuz and the air hub. The route will open Sunday and the Flughafen Express (FEX) will bounce between the airport, central station (Hauptbahnhof), Potsdamer Platz and Südkreuz every 15 minutes. The route was originally built in 1875 but was shutttered in 1957 because of the wall thing. Deutsche Bahn asked for a permit to resurrect it in 1997 but residents of Lichtenrade (including Berlin’s awful-but-also-popular ex-mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD)) fought unsuccessfully to have the tracks go under their neighborhood, delaying construction until 2020. Trains to Dresden will now only need 90 minutes.

More money to fight bad landlords

Berlin set aside €4.5 million in each of the next two years to better sniff out and possibly prosecute greedy landlords charging renters illegal sums, according to Tagesspiegel. The money will be used to hire as many as 19 new investigators as well as create a portal where renters can report money-grubbing landlords. Renters themselves most often have to sue to correct their rents because high rents only become a criminal matter when they charge more than 20% over the average area rent. Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg fined a landlord €26,253 in October in one of the first of such cases in the capital.

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Oil leak in Brandenburg

About 200,000 liters of crude oil leaked from a pipeline northwest of Berlin Wednesday as workers prepared for a safety test on the pipeline that they then apparently failed, according to RBB24. The pipeline delivers crude oil from a port on the nearby Baltic Sea to the PCK refinery in Schwedt which is essentially the only refinery serving Germany’s capital in a stunning bit of poor infrastructure planning. The leak has been repaired and the refinery apparently has enough oil to keep all the cars and trucks cruising around Berlin (and environs). Also a new hydrogen pipeline in the region went online, also according to RBB24, reusing pipes built for the now-defunct Nord Stream natural gas pipeline but there are few interested in the element as a fuel, mostly because it’s a dumb, energy-intensive idea.

Shots fired!

Shootings are already up 27% over last year — mostly resulting in property damage — either because local crime families are vying for territory or because Turkish crime families are blackmailing their countrymen with businesses in Berlin, according to taz. Most media reports say the shots usually come after demands for protection money — one man was killed by the shots and a Berlin driving school has had windows in four of its seven locations damaged by bullets. Last year, cops recorded 363 firearms offenses that included shots fired while they’ve already investigated 460 this year — the most in Germany’s 16 states, followed oddly by Saarland next to France.

🍺 🥨 Germany-wide news 🥨 🍺

⛔ Berlin to Afghans: Never mind, good luck

😶‍🌫️ Outlook gloomier than thought

⚽ Women’s soccer breaks with Bundesliga

Factoid

What, according to T-Online, have y’all googled this year (what Berliners chatGPTed would be waaaaaay more interesting):

Bundestagswahl (federal election)
Charlie Kirk 🤢
Iran
Frauen-EM (Women’s European soccer cup)
Labubu
Xatar (convicted robber rapper with interesting history, if yer into German rap)
Klub-WM (FIFA Club World Cup 2025)
Handball-WM (who watches that ‘sport’?)
Laura Dahlmeier
Haftbefehl (ho hum German rapper with a dull Netflix documentary about his coke abuse)

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